Short stories are hard!

I mentioned in my last post that my current novel started out as a short story, and has quickly grown into a fully fledged grown up novel.  This is all well and good, and I'm really enjoying the story -- isn't it great when you are enjoying the story as a reader as much as a writer as you go!  But the problem is, I really wanted it to be a short story.  Aside from the fact that before I began I didn't think enough "stuff" was happening to warrant a full book, I wanted to begin the series with a fun 30,000 word story, which I have since learned is actually considered a Novella, that I could put out for free on Amazon to get people introduced to my series.  Since this is that story, now I'm going to have to decide if I want to just make this novel available for free, or if I want to find another story to write a novella out of to introduce the series.  Part of this is marketing driven, but really it should just be story driven.  So for now, I do not have a story reason to have something come before this book, so the answer seems to be to just make this book free.  However by the time I finish writing book 3, I may have an idea that would work great as an intro novella that I haven't even thought about yet.  So while I do tend to be a planner and want to know what is going to happen, I need to try not to worry my pretty little head about things like marketing a book that I will not even be releasing for another 6-12 months.

And you heard it here first.  I hope to have my new series introduced the world sometime next spring or summer.  I don't have a title for the full series of 9(+?) books yet.  I'm thinking about keeping it simple and calling it the Stonebrook Romance Collection.  

What I have learned is that pacing a short story or novella takes a lot of planning, and since a novel length story seems to come fairly naturally to me, I imagine I'm going to struggle writing those more than I had thought I would.   A year ago, I would never have guessed I'd be having this problem, and would have put money on it being easier to write a short story.  I'll just add that to the list of about 500 other things I've learned about writing in the past year.